Fix Yaws

[II Lock-Down II]

Decreasing acm buildup even more would be terrible, its already pretty non existent as it is, which sucks ass.

Lmfao what. I don't even play the other stances and somehow gain ACM easy, blue and purple.


The real problem of this game is all stances have been utterly turned to shit to all fight a narrow viewed way. Each style isn't as unique as they used to be, and you can thank all the yellow style crybabies who brought about these changes. And they're still doing it to this day

 

[Hessu]

Lmfao what. I don't even play the other stances and somehow gain ACM easy, blue and purple.


The real problem of this game is all stances have been utterly turned to shit to all fight a narrow viewed way. Each style isn't as unique as they used to be, and you can thank all the yellow style crybabies who brought about these changes. And they're still doing it to this day

Blue is the easiest style to gain acm with... if you play against people who can pb, you will very rarely get acm. You can thank saberdevs for that, not the players. People rather use yellow because its the only good style, others are either op or too weak

 

[Jay Brando]

Blue is the easiest style to gain acm with... if you play against people who can pb, you will very rarely get acm. You can thank saberdevs for that, not the players. People rather use yellow because its the only good style, others are either op or too weak

its obvious that devs dont want people to be able to just hit and not ever be hit by a dueling opponent.

but in my opinion the balance between perma walking so that you can regen and pb, and landing quick strikes while being evasive, is too far tipped towards perma walking where most of the best players are just turtles who can counter effectively.

if damage multipliers didnt rape duelists who aren't swingblocking every hit, or if acm stacked up quicker (or made you hit harder per each acm you gain, more than currently), or if BP regen was lowered, maybe we'd see a more exciting system where taking risks pays off more and also punishes you more if you fail in executing them.

not that playing like a tortoise that PBs everything doesnt show skill, because its very hard to do so, but its fucking boring. hardly ever does someone in sentinel duel make the first swing on me.

but really the only things I think are even gonna be considered by these "developers" of the mod are lowering BP regen and unlocking the camera on speed lunge. the attack and defense numbers for each saber style have been constant for so so long, the DFAs and saber moves havent been changed since the homosexual "purple stab" was put in, since people want to just poke eachother off of ledges without having to look gay as fuck using blue style.

please shake up the game for fuck sake, gunners are strong now, noobs stand a chance, make saber vs saber interesting please god because playing against only blue, yellow, and staff users has gotten boring because of the amazing interrupt and parry system.



also revert repulse, throwing somone into a wall thats angled just a few degrees instead of FLAT against their back hardly ever kills them and just puts them out of punch or saber range

 

[Hessu]

its obvious that devs dont want people to be able to just hit and not ever be hit by a dueling opponent.

but in my opinion the balance between perma walking so that you can regen and pb, and landing quick strikes while being evasive, is too far tipped towards perma walking where most of the best players are just turtles who can counter effectively.

if damage multipliers didnt rape duelists who aren't swingblocking every hit, or if acm stacked up quicker (or made you hit harder per each acm you gain, more than currently), or if BP regen was lowered, maybe we'd see a more exciting system where taking risks pays off more and also punishes you more if you fail in executing them.

not that playing like a tortoise that PBs everything doesnt show skill, because its very hard to do so, but its fucking boring. hardly ever does someone in sentinel duel make the first swing on me.

but really the only things I think are even gonna be considered by these "developers" of the mod are lowering BP regen and unlocking the camera on speed lunge. the attack and defense numbers for each saber style have been constant for so so long, the DFAs and saber moves havent been changed since the homosexual "purple stab" was put in, since people want to just poke eachother off of ledges without having to look gay as fuck using blue style.

please shake up the game for fuck sake, gunners are strong now, noobs stand a chance, make saber vs saber interesting please god because playing against only blue, yellow, and staff users has gotten boring because of the amazing interrupt and parry system.



also revert repulse, throwing somone into a wall thats angled just a few degrees instead of FLAT against their back hardly ever kills them and just puts them out of punch or saber range

Being evasive and dodging swings > walking. Its much easier to fight someone whos barely moving than someone who keeps dodging your swings and making you chase them. I do agree with the damage multipliers, they are pretty bad right now, they have to be sorted out before making acm gain easier (which tempest has done for the next patch) "gunners are strong now" whats wrong with that?
Also homosexual purple stab hahah

 

[Karus]

Not talking about 1.4 pbc and mbc, watched a video of 1.4.9 and the counter hit right by the end of the return animation, which is the same as on current build, so i was wrong about counter speed being slower on earlier builds, at least 1.4.
Except sometimes they are buggy and faster than they should, like on that clip i posted, maybe its not instant but i do the same counter swing before him and it was slower than his, sometimes its faster than it should be. And i don't believe my slap had anything to do with that.

tldr: system bad, fast yaws stronger than they should be in my opinion

The clip you posted of Kebar doesn't show anything wrong at all, imo.
You used slap, so his swing was bound to hit you, despite the speed his yaw could have caused it to travel at.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure the reason it hit slightly faster than your return, was because he was looking slightly to the side (which was in order to PB your swing).
That's called PB'ing into CS, and doesn't require yaw to pull off.
Had you PB'd his opening WD swing, and performed a successful CS, you may have found that the swing speed would have matched his final SD CS.
PB'ing and attack masking kind of go hand-in-hand, which is (I'm assuming) what you actually have a problem with.

 

[Duckshark]

Yaws in and of themselves are necessary to be able to change the timing of your swings. Yaws can be annoying if someone is deliberately avoiding swinging into your cursor and manipulating their zones using movement, but at this point you are just losing to a more skilled duelist. Of course, this can be mitigated with distancing (counters almost always land if you both yaw correctly and walk away from your opponent), slaps, predictive PBs, etc.

The biggest issue, however, is having these extremely fast swings like dualies A halfswing and combos, where anyone fighting it is forced to be passive and predictively swing on certain timings, and simply hope that their swing will land. Dualies is the most egregious example, since it possesses both a near-instant halfswing (A counter/halfswing in facehug), fast combos, an instantly-hitting stab that is un-PBable and interrupts counterswings, and has alright range (at least, better than staff's range). When you combine all these tools with yaws, it makes it seem like yaws are the issue when they are at most an inconvenience for PBing, and are more a timing tool at the highest level that happen to complement near-instant swings.

The problem to target here is not swings that are fast when yawed (otherwise cyan swings would fit that same bill), but swings that do not require you to move your mouse to get ultrafast counters/halfswings, which lowers the skillcap and incentivizes facehug spam. Blue combos/halfswings, dualies A halfswing, dualies stab, and staff counters/halfswing stand out as the biggest offenders of this facehug "chainsaw" style, and even if you can beat most randoms who try to abuse these styles, a top tier blue or dualies is nonetheless a pain in the ass to fight, especially since they can get very fast hits without needing to turn or look very far from their opponent.

Regarding Tempest's patch, when I tried it in the spring, I would say that the biggest offenders to me are the dualies A halfswing and stab, and some of the new yellow counters are much too quick and do not sacrifice cursor position for a fast hit. Blue and staff have been tweaked to be slower on many of their abusive swings. The one exception to me would be Tempest's yellow A swing counter, since that does half damage and is relatively harmless in comparison to most swings.

The main message is: Yawing is a necessary mechanic, but you should have to sacrifice your cursor positioning and look away from your opponent to yaw, whether yawing faster or slower. If you can swing quickly without moving your cursor and have both fast swings and a ready defense, that's when the system needs to change.

tl;dr: when do I get a new computer so I can rant more about MB2

 

[Hessu]

The clip you posted of Kebar doesn't show anything wrong at all, imo.
You used slap, so his swing was bound to hit you, despite the speed his yaw could have caused it to travel at.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure the reason it hit slightly faster than your return, was because he was looking slightly to the side (which was in order to PB your swing).
That's called PB'ing into CS, and doesn't require yaw to pull off.
Had you PB'd his opening WD swing, and performed a successful CS, you may have found that the swing speed would have matched his final SD CS.
PB'ing and attack masking kind of go hand-in-hand, which is (I'm assuming) what you actually have a problem with.

He was facing forward, as you can see on the slow mo. I dont think pbing his swing would have mattered at all. You assume wrong

 

[Karus]

He was facing forward, as you can see on the slow mo. I dont think pbing his swing would have mattered at all. You assume wrong

? He couldn't have been facing forward or he wouldn't have PB'd your swing...
PB'ing his swing wouldn't have mattered, no, but it would have positioned your playermodel to the side, allowing your potential CS to hit faster.

 

[Hessu]

Yaws in and of themselves are necessary to be able to change the timing of your swings. Yaws can be annoying if someone is deliberately avoiding swinging into your cursor and manipulating their zones using movement, but at this point you are just losing to a more skilled duelist. Of course, this can be mitigated with distancing (counters almost always land if you both yaw correctly and walk away from your opponent), slaps, predictive PBs, etc.

The biggest issue, however, is having these extremely fast swings like dualies A halfswing and combos, where anyone fighting it is forced to be passive and predictively swing on certain timings, and simply hope that their swing will land. Dualies is the most egregious example, since it possesses both a near-instant halfswing (A counter/halfswing in facehug), fast combos, an instantly-hitting stab that is un-PBable and interrupts counterswings, and has alright range (at least, better than staff's range). When you combine all these tools with yaws, it makes it seem like yaws are the issue when they are at most an inconvenience for PBing, and are more a timing tool at the highest level that happen to complement near-instant swings.

The problem to target here is not swings that are fast when yawed (otherwise cyan swings would fit that same bill), but swings that do not require you to move your mouse to get ultrafast counters/halfswings, which lowers the skillcap and incentivizes facehug spam. Blue combos/halfswings, dualies A halfswing, dualies stab, and staff counters/halfswing stand out as the biggest offenders of this facehug "chainsaw" style, and even if you can beat most randoms who try to abuse these styles, a top tier blue or dualies is nonetheless a pain in the ass to fight, especially since they can get very fast hits without needing to turn or look very far from their opponent.

Regarding Tempest's patch, when I tried it in the spring, I would say that the biggest offenders to me are the dualies A halfswing and stab, and some of the new yellow counters are much too quick and do not sacrifice cursor position for a fast hit. Blue and staff have been tweaked to be slower on many of their abusive swings. The one exception to me would be Tempest's yellow A swing counter, since that does half damage and is relatively harmless in comparison to most swings.

The main message is: Yawing is a necessary mechanic, but you should have to sacrifice your cursor positioning and look away from your opponent to yaw, whether yawing faster or slower. If you can swing quickly without moving your cursor and have both fast swings and a ready defense, that's when the system needs to change.

tl;dr: when do I get a new computer so I can rant more about MB2

Good post, yawing being necessary is exactly the problem i was talking about. I dont think it should be necessary, it wasnt such a big factor in duels before yellow only era

 

[Hessu]

? He couldn't have been facing forward or he wouldn't have PB'd your swing...

 

[Duckshark]

I'm not a dev so take what I say with a grain of salt, but there was a plan to make yawed starter-frame hits deal slightly less BP damage than regular swings, so facehug hyperyaw wouldn't deal as much damage as if they let the swing play out.

But tbh when I was last active in the duel scene there weren't many top tiers who abused yawing to an unnatural degree, and it wasn't like you needed to yaw anything besides counterswings to be really good. RogueWookiee is probably the most yaw-based duelist in NA top tier and it's not like he's abusing insta-hits:

 

[Hessu]

I'm not a dev so take what I say with a grain of salt, but there was a plan to make yawed starter-frame hits deal slightly less BP damage than regular swings, so facehug hyperyaw wouldn't deal as much damage as if they let the swing play out.

But tbh when I was last active in the duel scene there weren't many top tiers who abused yawing to an unnatural degree, and it wasn't like you needed to yaw anything besides counterswings to be really good. RogueWookiee is probably the most yaw-based duelist in NA top tier and it's not like he's abusing insta-hits:

Man has maxed sens and dpi lol

 

[RogueWookiee]

Man has maxed sens and dpi lol

5 sens and 400 dpi

 

[cocaine]

Reject saber
Return to melee

 

[II Lock-Down II]

So I've encountered some sweaty losers in duel mode who yes abuse this yaw Effect by making their values 9000 or w.e and their obviously using some sort of keybind that when they do this fast yaw spam they somehow parry drain you to 0 especially with dual sabers as well. The red jump bug should be fixed too. All these keybind abuse buttons would make half of these so called good duelist be shite because they aren't good without them.

 

[Tempest]

its obvious that devs dont want people to be able to just hit and not ever be hit by a dueling opponent.

One of the first things that I tried to do when I became a dev was work on trying to fix collision. It got frankensteined into 1.5 when my efforts weren't entirely done and I've tried to bandaid it a bit but eventually just stopped because it was causing some issues trying to do partial fixes rather than what I've done now in my build where I just basically redid it from scratch. A lot of the things that people notice like the occasional frontwack and whatnot are things I identified and fixed (it going from semi-consistently expected in duels right now to almost gone, as long as merges don't randomly break stuff).

but in my opinion the balance between perma walking so that you can regen and pb, and landing quick strikes while being evasive, is too far tipped towards perma walking where most of the best players are just turtles who can counter effectively.

More of what I've done over the years is remove a lot of the stacked layers of multipliers. Some of this is 50/50 as to whether it was good IMO but it has, in my build, made it so there's a lot more variety in what's possible as far as more evasive vs those who want to stand their ground (without having to play an exact certain way). Given, in public, you can out-time most of the people who just stand there but the main offender is PBs in returns, which I've adjusted to need to actually not play hyper-passive and actually land hits to make use of it, rather than it be a huge coverup of timing windows to fight back against.

if damage multipliers didnt rape duelists who aren't swingblocking every hit, or if acm stacked up quicker (or made you hit harder per each acm you gain, more than currently), or if BP regen was lowered, maybe we'd see a more exciting system where taking risks pays off more and also punishes you more if you fail in executing them.

ACM will stack up more consistently and intuitively in my stuff. Damage will start out about the same but winning will actually feel like you're winning rather than just kind of smacking each other and, outside of interrupts, not really feeling like anything is going on. BP regen is higher alongside this so it's not super punishing + helps for 1vX a bit.

but really the only things I think are even gonna be considered by these "developers" of the mod are lowering BP regen and unlocking the camera on speed lunge. the attack and defense numbers for each saber style have been constant for so so long, the DFAs and saber moves havent been changed since the homosexual "purple stab" was put in, since people want to just poke eachother off of ledges without having to look gay as fuck using blue style.

All of this is stuff I looked at and adjusted. Most of the styles are going to be pretty close in their offense/defense values now (so no giga tanking styles by just holding block, actually have to play well for the most part instead of be able to consistently make mistakes over and over with most of the "defensive" styles) with a before/after of:
Offense: Lowest of 6, highest of 19 vs Lowest of 4, highest of 14
Defense: Lowest of 42, highest of 70 vs Lowest of 47, highest of 54

Also, Red has a new special move, Cyan has its stab, and Purple has its previous kata. Fixes to hitboxes and changes to specials' damage multpliers/intended use make them work more cohesively rather than the historical useless/completely broken.

please shake up the game for fuck sake, gunners are strong now, noobs stand a chance, make saber vs saber interesting please god because playing against only blue, yellow, and staff users has gotten boring because of the amazing interrupt and parry system.

In my stuff, you can actually consistently 100 BP kill less experienced players without just sitting and letting them swing first and abusing PBs in returns. The parry window is actually fixed so you can punish sloppy swing timings and there's no more infinite parrying so stuff like crouch + 4swinging is not really valid as a strategy anymore unless you get giga out-timed somehow.

I'm not a dev so take what I say with a grain of salt, but there was a plan to make yawed starter-frame hits deal slightly less BP damage than regular swings, so facehug hyperyaw wouldn't deal as much damage as if they let the swing play out.

I did actually end up implementing this mechanic. I tuned it so that it really only hits the insta swings and clamps the damage inversely proportional to that of interrupts so that while it's still useful as as a timing tool, the damage isn't going to be as oppressive by a good margin. Normal fast yaws (as in, still having to actually move your mouse to affect the swing) are still fine as is.

 

[Jay Brando]

All of this is stuff I looked at and adjusted. Most of the styles are going to be pretty close in their offense/defense values now (so no giga tanking styles by just holding block, actually have to play well for the most part instead of be able to consistently make mistakes over and over with most of the "defensive" styles) with a before/after of:
Offense: Lowest of 6, highest of 19 vs Lowest of 4, highest of 14
Defense: Lowest of 42, highest of 70 vs Lowest of 47, highest of 54

Also, Red has a new special move, Cyan has its stab, and Purple has its previous kata. Fixes to hitboxes and changes to specials' damage multpliers/intended use make them work more cohesively rather than the historical useless/completely broken.

the overall flattening of attack and defense values is slightly worrying but we'll just have to see how it feels once the fabled tempest build drops, just as the forefathers have been predicting for some time

 

[bash]

Red has a new special move and purple got it's previous special move!? That's the coolest thing ever! Purple kata rocks

 

[Eazy E]

A lot of the issues come with the communities willingness to abuse the saber system. Sure there are tons of internally bullshit things relating to say other styles/colours or whatever. But a perfectly balanced game is impossible to produce and MB2 especially has experienced it’s fair share of shitty metas. Changing the meta will fuck over current meta abusers sure but in the end ur just gonna have another meta for other people to abuse. Look at SeV for example, no disrespect. But a lot of his videos especially against top EU, are him abusing whatever patch’s “meta” he is on to keep up. And to be honest as shitty as it is I can’t even blame these people anymore. You aren’t forced to duel these people nor are you forced to play that way either. A meta is an easy way out for easy kills, but top players with superior mechanics always come out on top. Meta is a better way to get kills or win duels, but it doesn’t make you a better player. And I think if you look at people like me and karus vs say Threepwood, the living embodiment of meta, it’s a pretty perfect example of meta isint everything, even if it’s annoying. And yaws are not even close to the biggest issue in this game

Tbf this sorta encapsulates the current build.

Doesn't matter if you use whatever the most meta playstyle currently is if the opponent has superior PB/SB/Timing etc... You'll end up losing.

Plus the current "meta" isn't that bad, it isn't 1.1/1.2 where you just spammed purple stab or the patch with MBcounters. Most people can't even agree on what the "perfect meta playstyle" is for the current patch. I mean some people say it's hyper aggressive yawing but then I've seen others cry when Danwan does his shadowswing spam and accuse him of meta abuse. So what is the meta? Facehug spam or shadowswing abuse, I doubt you could get the community to agree.

Without a doubt many playstyles that were good in the past have been neutered in the current build but there is no Super-OP unbeatable meta like the days of purple stab spam. Sure a shadowswing spammer is gonna have a huge advantage over someone who plays balanced/defensive due to the small BP damage multiplier from getting hit while running not outweighing the benefits of becoming near untouchable unless the opponent is willing to aggressively facehug you (which most high-level players tend to avoid) and there are other such playstyles that have a HUGE and clear edge over most others that were viable in the past no doubt. However, your playstyle in the current patch is maybe 20% of the duel the entirety of the rest is mastery of mechanics.

No matter how well built your playstyle is at countering someone else's if they are more skilled they are almost guaranteed to win. Abusing "meta" is mostly just to help players who are slightly worse than the opponent they are facing be able to fill the gap, not allow low-tiers to take on no-lifers.